A Memoir of My Body

I’m getting a gastric bypass later this month. So, as I write this, I am feeling all sorts of emotions. Nerves are creeping up all over my body at the thought of having something done to me that’s so permanent. Weirdly, I’m feeling this because I have tattoos. Getting a bypass is not as glamorous or beautiful as getting another Harley Quinn artwork stabbed into me. It’s also not as fun. But what it does have in common is that these permanent changes will be present in my body for all the world to see. What’s different is how people react to it.

My entire life, my body has been on display. In Filipino culture, your weight is something that older relatives love to comment on. Parties and dinners are riddled with aunts who will get all up in my business asking if I have a girlfriend and wondering how I gained so much weight. I know they don’t mean any harm, but they feel the need to tell me as if I’ve never seen my own body before. Also, all we serve at parties is the pig, so why is that a surprise? In their defense, being fat in a developing nation is a sign that you have enough money to buy food. I can understand that weight is equal to wealth in the eyes of my people’s culture. However, it still doesn’t feel great that I’m going lose my foot to diabetes and die single.

As a child, I was diagnosed with a lung problem that limited my ability to eat. I started losing weight like crazy. I swear to god I could walk the Victoria’s Secret runway if they would let a 7-year-old boy do it since I was as skinny as those twig bitches. I was snatched. My collar bones showing, my rib cage protruding, and my buccal fat was nonexistent. I was as gaunt as the crypt keeper. And even then I couldn’t escape the dreaded comments asking why I was so skinny and being forcefully invited to eat. So what the fuck? Am I too skinny? Too fat? Make up your damn minds.

In my escorting days, I was lean and sexy. I had the porn star body and rippling abs. If you’ve ever known me throughout those years in my life you would have never seen it since I enjoyed baggy clothes. The TikTok generation calls it a sleeper build. I was irresistible to the boys and even girls. I got Grindr messages day in and day out to the point where my phone became unusable because I got so many notifications. I used this phase of my body to make money, and I was good at it. I still wasn’t happy that people wanted me only for my body, but at least I was sad sitting atop a pile of cash. Which is not that bad.

After getting raped and phasing out of escorting, my brain did something funny. She said, “Tim, let’s overeat and make ourselves morbidly fat so that nobody will ever touch you again. Good idea!” That didn’t work since I was drugged and raped again at a bar and woke up in a stranger’s apartment in the west end of the city. For those of you reading and want a fun morning trying to put the pieces together from what can only be described as a mess of a night, I highly recommend it. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book except the police are involved and there’s way more reading old texts and checking Uber receipts.

My point is this: people have treated me very differently in all the stages of my body, and I’m scared about what’s to come next. The same people who wouldn’t even take a second look at me when I was fat are also the same people sending me unsolicited dick pics and trying to sleep with me while my body was rockin’. I have always felt that my body is on constant display and scrutiny for the world to pick apart. I was molested when I was fat, and I was raped when I was fit. Sexual assault has been the most common factor in my body’s journey. That and an irritable bowel. At least I have a fighting chance against sexual assault.

Right now, my body is in this weird mixed stage of muscular and fatty. Got these nice big arms and a dump truck of an ass while sporting a comfortable beer belly. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes back in 2020, and my doctor put me up for this surgery because he thinks it would help with the diabetes. I’m not doing this for the weight loss. I’m doing this so I don’t have to keep jabbing Ozempic in my stomach because I’m not made of money. The weight loss is just something that comes with surgery. I can’t turn back now since I’ve already committed to it. And with just days away from the big date, all I can think about is how are people going to treat me.

My body will certainly transform. I may lose a bunch of weight, or maybe not at all. My skin may show signs of excess sag, or it could stay tight and shrink with the weight loss. I don’t know anything. All I can do right now is to prepare for the wave of “Oh my god, you look so good!” comments once I start posting selfies again. Why is it that I only get those kinds of comments when I lose weight? I never get those kinds of comments now. I know you don’t mean anything by it, and it’s a genuine compliment, but why only when I look visibly skinny do I get complimented? I don’t get enough love for looking how I look now, or for basically having the tightest asshole all of the Greater Toronto Area. I mean, do I look sick to you?

Don’t answer that.

And it’s not just those kinds of compliments that irk me. I also get the off-color backhanded compliment where someone will say, “Wow you are such an inspiration. Seeing a fat body doing all those moves makes me want to take up pole dancing too.” Who told you that I was some sort of protest? I’m not some sob story or inspiration porn that you can jack off to. Why do I have to be the fat pole dancer and not just a pole dancer? I’m glad that you’ve found someone to look up to, but do it on your own time, and don’t use my body as an excuse to make you feel good about yourself. That’s your job.

I’ve reached a point of body neutrality where I don’t care about how my body looks. As long as it gets me from point A to point B, then I’m fine with it. The rest of the world isn’t catching up. With fat shaming and body positivity dividing the internet more and more each day when there are more important things to worry about, I am at a point in my body acceptance journey where I truly just don’t give a flying frozen fried fuck. If you wanna comment on my body, by all means, go ahead. But I want you to ask yourself why you thought that it was okay to do that. Why did you think it was fine for you to call me sexy when I lost weight and say nothing when I gained? Ask yourself why you thought it was okay for you to call me a fat pole dancer instead of just a good pole dancer.

Whether you’re fetishizing my body or hating it, I would rather you keep it to yourself. My body looks how it should. I’m okay with it and you should be too. Now leave me out of your comments because I have this meal replacement shake to chug, and I’m miserable enough as it is. I’ll see you when I’m a hundred pounds lighter.